The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOThe judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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The Constitution was framed upon the theory that the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long run prosperity and salvation are in union and not division.
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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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Danger invites rescue. … The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.
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The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
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The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances. Substitute statute for decision, and you shift the center of authority, but add no quota of inspired wisdom.
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Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
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There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
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With traps and obstacles and hazards confronting us on every hand, only blindness or indifference will fail to turn in all humility, for guidance or for warning, to the study of examples.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO